FriendOfDeSoto

@FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does it damage my phone in any way it I use a faulty cable to charge it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No one here can tell you for sure what’s wrong with your cable. So no one can answer if it will be good or bad over time. Slow (normal) charging is better for your battery than fast charging. A wobbly wire might stop and restart the charging process, which might be detrimental to the battery over time.

  But it could also be that your port is so clogged up with pocket lint that the contact in your phone is affected and that’s why fast charging no longer works. Something could be broken in the brick you use and that’s why it won’t work any more. It could be that the cable was bent so many times it’s broken. It’s probably that.

  You could try to narrow down where the error lies. If you use a friend’s cable does the same thing happen? Friend’s fine-working cable in your power brick? If you got a phone repair kiosk in your neighborhood, maybe ask them if they could clean your port. If they’re friendly, they can probably help you narrow down this problem also.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you were reincarnated, wouldn't it be elsewhere in the universe?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s safe to say these thoughts weren’t necessarily factored in in the first beliefs in reincarnation. A lot of this stuff is about thinking horizons. If you don’t know about the vastness of space, you think everything happens around you. So you must be reborn close as well. And then the universe is being revealed (still) bit by bit. If your science isn’t great, you could be forgiven for thinking the world is 6000 years old and maybe created in a week. But then your horizons broaden and there is a lag in how the new knowledge filters into these established belief systems. So if you tried to argue logically about a reincarnation system, yes, it would be likely that you could become a rock near a supermassive black hole or a slug on a planet far, far away just as much as an ant on Earth (depending on how you fared in life). But logic and belief are natural opponents. I think all the Dalai Lamas were reincarnated on this planet. So that’s odd then, isn’t it? Doubt lengthens the lag.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"A guitarist who's also an astronaut" sounds more impressive than "An astronaut who plays the guitar", despite both meaning the same thing.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If either one says anyways here’s wonderwall and launches into the song I’ll be ready to shoot them into the sun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The worst day to get Groundhog Day'd would be when you have an early flight in the morning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I fear as the number n of the repeated day approaches infinity, any day would be horrible to have to relive again. And again. And again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do females got to be so hard to talk or flirt with?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If your approach at dating hasn’t materialized in anything, perhaps it is time to change your approach. For me, the best things happened when I wasn’t trying at all. Be social, be courteous, be nice - and as the owner of a penis: non-threatening.

  You have self identified a problem of anxiety. If your next step is to criticize all “females” as being difficult in terms of dating, you’re missing a beat here and making a bad word choice. The problem may be more of a you-problem than a them-problem. Also, no matter the primary sexual organ situation, people can pick up on both an air of entitlement or the scent of desperation.

  Also, all cicadas shout for sex but not every cicadas gets laid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To win the show Alone, could someone smuggle a GPS locator inside of their anus?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If there is no checking in place, like an airport security check and/or check for devices emitting radio waves. Also, the producers know where the candidates are at, don’t they? If they spot regular drone flights in the area, I think the game will be up as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Prince Andrew must be seething that Donald Trump gets to chug along like nothing happened.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean by normal people standards, you are correct. He’s had to replace a golden spoon up his royal posterior with a silver one. But he still lives in a big house and will never want for money in his life. His involvement did cost him his representative job. He’s been royally demoted. So there were consequences for him although I’d be the first to agree they weren’t sufficiently punitive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who had it worse?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Now i’m torn. On the one hand I want to dismiss your counter argument as a counter factual and therefore there is no need to even glance at it. On the other hand, the omnipotent dick is part of the equation and he can control these things and I kinda see where you’re coming from. I would say he is being more of a d though because he is rubbing Picard’s nose in how unprepared humanity is in the stars. The fact that his finger snapping detour shortened the encounter timeline with the Borgs may have had the one positive effect: forewarning for the feds. And that may have put them in a position to win by the skin of their teeth. So your counter argument holds some limited and not massive amount of water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who had it worse?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Q is just a dick. He could’ve brought Voyager back home but didn’t and then involved Janeway in that continuufederacy civil war. He exposed Picard and crew to the Borgs and didn’t lift a finger when he got Locutussed. I think in terms of dead people he may have screwed Picard over more. I may be wrong but I think more people died in that cross section being cut out by the Borgs as a direct result of Q finger snapping the D out to meet them. But at the core, he just does stuff because he’s a bored omnipotent dick and he makes everyone in his path suffer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In my house, I have a no dumping on the couch rule. If you come in and take a dump on my couch, I don’t care how insightful your thoughts are, you’re out the door. In terms of the fediverse, you merely seem confused about what constitutes taking a dump. These rules are available though, you just have to read them.

  If you have spare time while developing your Don Quiote complex, give a passing thought to what censorship means. Nobody is banning you from having your super intellectual thoughts about government on the internet. Start a blog, your own lemmy instance, and fire away. But nobody has to listen to your thoughts; we’re free to go seek out other bullshit if we so please. That’s not censorship, that’s how the free exchange of ideas works. You don’t have the right to be heard on your terms in somebody else’s forum. And who knows, maybe modding your own would teach you a level of empathy that might make you feel embarrassed about your comments on this thread.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is no accounting for taste.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do people hate coldplay?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They are the epitome of the adage that their earlier stuff was better. For me, they jumped the shark when Roman Catholic bells were ringing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just realized some people LIKE talking to each other.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And those folks aren’t on here because they already do their socializing in person. A frightful thought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a font/typeface designing program that is available for Windows or Linux that supports creation of variable fonts and OpenType features?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe 10 years ago I tried designing a font in Inkscape. It was possible but more of a gimmick. I then installed Fontforge and very quickly decided I wasn’t going to learn how to use it, didn’t have the bandwidth. But the tools are there. Both methods have a learning curve but I think have enough instruction resources online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Wars is an ode to the stupidest use of battle lasers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you beginning to feel a narrowing of your throat?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In languages which use complex written characters (such as Chinese's logographs), is there an equivalent to English's "text speak" shorthand?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s difficult 2 transpose what u can do in English just 2 other languages written in the Latin alphabet for centuries. English has a remarkable and quite confusing amount of homophones that is absent from other indoeuropean languages. The apostrophe as a letter skipped marker is fairly universal. But beyond that it’s already a different ball game in other more similar languages. 2 to too, 4 for, r u - that’s very English only.

  Simplified Chinese characters are a hint at what they did on the Chinese mainland to cut down on writing time. Beyond that (and I don’t speak the language so 🧂) there are single character abbreviations for countries. 美国 is America and 美 suffices as shorthand, which means beauty otherwise. Your example phrase is “R u coming 2nite?” In English we use the present progressive tense here, which doesn’t exist like that in Mandarin. It would be phrased as “Come tonight?” The question mark could be replaced with the character that functions as a question marker by itself. And I think you can do this in 3-4 characters and I think they might just beat you to it in a bilingual texting competition in terms of speed.

  The mainland population may also be more adept to obfuscate their speech especially online. So similarly pronounced character combinations take over the meaning of a term the censors are actively looking for.

  The Japanese like shortening stuff, mostly loanwords, to unrecognizable words. The word for part time work is アルバイト (arubaito) taken from the German for work (Arbeit). Cool kids have whittled it down to baito. A remote control has become a リモコン (rimokon) in normal parlance. Overly long Chinese character combos like 自動販売機 for a vending machine get shortened to 自販機 dropping characters that can be inferred (if you speak it).

  I also want to add that text speak is heavily influenced by restrictions on text length and charges for each text. Non Latin script characters take up more than one Latin character per Chinese character for instance. It’s probably 5+ in decoding per character. So you reach 160 letters quite quickly and that’s why SMS in China was very cheap and quickly adopted a system where message threads would be sent and put back together on the recipient’s phone. In Japan they used email from the start, even in dumb phone T9 texting days. They had no Twitter-like restrictions on text length so they didn’t need to be shorter than what their thumbs could successfully fumble together.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Q anon was a psyop.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s not call it psy op then. We need a new term. BS op maybe?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I think better when I'm calm. So it follows that getting calmer will make me smarter.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re looking at correlation more than causation. That’s what the enlarged gas tank metaphor in another comment here is trying to hint at.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I think better when I'm calm. So it follows that getting calmer will make me smarter.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t mind your fiddling with that razor at all. I see what you mean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I think better when I'm calm. So it follows that getting calmer will make me smarter.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your intelligence isn’t improved by calmness. Calmness may simply be the state when it is the most unimpeded.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a 2009 YouTube video about a green, healthy looking fir tree growing inside a man's lung. CNN video shows a surgeon and the patient being interviewed.. was it a hoax?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think what you’re not picking up on is the whole Ms. Moos vibe on CNN. She is basically satire. She always jumps on the most outrageous stories and narrates them in that annoying pseudo journalistic voice and has done for decades. The stories may be actually true but you should never assume that they are. They are a knock knock joke for people who watch 24h news channels.

  I don’t know anything about this case more than having watched the CNN video. Mr. Fir-lung and his doctor needn’t be actors. He could’ve really had it in his lung but played up the “haha, maybe I breathed in a seed” line because it got him attention on TV and paid interviews. And he doesn’t mention how he was in a landslide being chased by a bear 5 years ago and that’s when he accidentally inhaled the debris. The doctor may just have mentioned in a subordinate clause that it looked as if the sprig was growing in the lung but never actually claimed it did. Or he also believes in homeopathy. Or he also got paid for the interview. There are a thousand explanations why we get presented the story like that. But the biggest red flag remains that Jeanne Moos was reporting on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Q anon was a psyop.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Psy op implies an amount of planning and the involvement of the military or the intelligence community. I think it is better attributed to chance that the cryptic pretentious musings of one person snowballed into a cultish internet movement. Because it garnered strength online, the musing person at the heart of it probably changed due to tiny power struggles.

  People like to know there is a plan for everything. People always suspect a secret cabal behind everything. People are also dumb and impressionable. It doesn’t take a general or CIA buffin to try to target the Venn diagram of those three groups. I think it had the results you describe, it contributed to what we see in the US today: a weakening of the rule of law and a slide into fascism.

  Calling QAnon psy op is giving what basically started as a 4chan meme too much credit. If no one took a gun to find a nonexistent basement in a DC pizza restaurant, society at large may have never discovered this snowballed cult, and jumped on it like a cat does catnip, enlarging its reach. The secret “cabal” behind it is maybe a handful of people. Bored and slightly Machiavellian internet users with odd political views and/or the love of endorphin-inducing likes and reach. Never attribute to conspiracy what you can more likely attribute to stupidity. QAnon is stupid. Stupidity with disastrous cobsequences. But not a planned psy op campaign.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you getting inundated with JFK was anti Israel posits and hot takes? Because I sure aren’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why doesn't the US government just tax illegal immigrants a little bit more than the Average american? Then use those funds to fix infastructure or a new WPA of the 21st century?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If illegal immigrants were possible to be identified easily by the IRS, ICE would have taken them over already.

  The problem is two-fold. A lot of the immigrants who fall into this “illegal” category are not on the books, they get a brown envelope, and pay little to no taxes at all. And the more “sophisticated” ones look just like your average American. So if you taxed them more, you’d be affecting a lot of the “legal” population as well.

  Also, the American economy is full of jobs that no “non-deportable” would like to do. Agricultural jobs come to mind. The current regime’s idea of eradicating all illegal immigrants runs contrary to a lot of economic interests (and I read that they’ve done a lot less deporting on the farms recently. Curious …) Even if you could just tax them more, you’d still mess with those interests as well.

  And while I’m not a tax lawyer, I’m gonna go out in a limb here and say it’s not going to be easy to make a tax law like that that isn’t going to be heavily scrutinized in the courts because it is unabashedly discriminatory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a term for something like Imposter Syndrome, but instead feeling like it’s other people conspiring to give you an illusory taste of success with intent to pull it away and screw you over?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gaslighting

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Conspiracy theorist always claim pyramid are build by aliens or giants, but then it could be just Sphinx covering their poop.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sphinxy is mad then. Or poops prodigiously. Sphinxy is much, much smaller than any of the surrounding pointy poop parlors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not an argument, that’s somebody who only looked at the cover of the cliff notes on presidential terms but didn’t read it. Consecutivity isn’t required. Neither president should get elected a third time without a change or suspension of the constitution. With the rule of law under 47 weakening it is not impossible but I’m still optimistic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do animals in the Peppa Pig universe work?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So you’re trying to apply logic to an animated kids show. My advice is: stop. It doesn’t matter. Cookie monster never eats a cookie either.

  I like to imagine that all creators of kids shows were high as a kite when they came up with the premise. [Takes a massive hit] “Duuuude, they’re like a team of first responder dogs but they can fly helicopters and one is a cop. They’re like the Village People but dogs.” [Takes another hit] “And they can talk!” And thus Paw Patrol was born.

  [Lights up spliff] “Oy, mate. 'ere’s the thing. She’s a cheeky one, this Peppa. And she’s a pig. 'Er 'ead’s always sideways. She’s always mucking about.” [Inhales deeply] “And all the other muppets are animals too. But get this: there are other animals.” [Exhales] “But they can’t talk.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the canonical version of STVI?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Who thought it is a good idea to let George Lucas edit Trek? It’s like an Odo shot first kind of situation. And I think Odo never used a phaser.

  Is this is the guy that Scotty shoots in the end? If so, I’ve only ever seen the version with that scene and the bad Mission: Impossible face mask reveal. And I owned this movie as a VHS bought in Europe as part of a set released before VII came out…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the canonical version of STVI?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  II, IV, and VI are all worth a watch. They are a good movie, an entertaining movie, and a surprisingly good movie respectively.

  I’ll watch the odd numbered ones as well but I’m a fan and I know I is too long, III is mostly not good, and I enjoy V for its craziness.